by Tim Pears
And so James tracked the streets of the town. In the early morning he snapped the eccentric street-cleaners in their orange overalls and then the crowd walking, running, cycling and driving over South Bridge to work. He came to know the people of the streets: police and traffic wardens, including the fearsome witch who bawled out visitors dumb enough to drive into the pedestrianized High Street; the street hawkers who filled the air with the aroma of flowers and coffee and, in winter, roast chestnuts; the transitory buskers and the permanent one, who wheeled a barrel organ into the town centre: he wound a handle and clockwork figures jerked unconvincingly to a monotonous jingle that irritated shop assistants and delighted children.
James came to recognize the madmen who were sane enough to travel the same streets as he – and who, unlike James, appeared to have too much purpose in their lives. He gave them names: the Walker, a dark-skinned man with a black beard and a thick duffel coat in all weathers, whom James saw all over town striding along with a wodge of old newspapers under his arm, as if heading for the nearest recycling skip in a one-man environmental crusade. There was Spider Woman, an anorexic transvestite; and Mother, who pushed an empty pram along with an expression on the verge of tears that never came; and Jock, who stood motionless in full tartan outside Marks and Spencer. When the hour chimed on St Andrew’s church clock he broke into a few steps of a Scottish reel, before reassuming his ghostly, shop-dummy stance.
James photographed them, in their freedom and loneliness.
When James dropped into the cinema after one of his sessions on the streets Zoe could always tell, from the look in his eyes. They were strangely vacant – as if the emptiness he’d tried to fill, through his eyes, had instead become visible through them.
‘You’ll wear your eyes out, sweetheart,’ she told him. ‘Your eyes will be worn out from looking,’ she warned.
‘I took a brilliant one just now,’ he told her. ‘Some guys were having a kickabout after work in the park, two teams, right? Eight or nine a side. But they all had different-coloured tops on, every single one, Zoe. I mean, it looked utterly bewildering, complete chaos. But they knew who was on their side, see, it’s a kind of magic the brain performs. It took a full roll but I think I captured it.’
‘Captured what?’
‘That. What I just said. The order within the chaos, within the players’ minds. A pattern. I think I got it.’
‘Good,’ Zoe said. ‘Well done, kiddo.’
‘Yeah, well, I better get going. Got to get some more while it’s still light and there’s people out. Thanks for the tea, Zoe. See you.’
‘See you, sweetheart,’ she called after his departing back. She watched him lurch doggedly along the street. ‘Why don’t you open your eyes?’ she whispered.
The streets of the town were filling up with more than commuters and shoppers, which might have pleased James except that it was with people who should have been indoors: they weren’t outside of their own choice. Onto the streets in those days came winos and beggars, homeless children, deranged schizophrenics yelling inexplicable curses, travellers forced off the road sleeping with their dogs in shop doorways. It was a strange period in the town: people had their clothes stolen off washing-lines and the police announced the arrest of shadowy, Fagin-like figures who ran gangs of ten-year-old pickpockets and bicycle thieves.
Jock, Spider Woman and the others found themselves jostling for space on the pavements with unemployed youths drinking cans of lager and burping belligerently at strangers; with evangelizing guerrillas from the Jesus Army, carrying a symbol not of the cross or the lamb but rather a sword; with Middle Eastern exiles persuading passers-by to look at Polaroids of torture victims and donate money to the cause of their release.
Campaigners, beggars, bums, they all saw James coming; even the most derelict and destitute could pick him out in a crowd from a distance, a soft touch. He didn’t mind. He was protected by his camera: he had a bargain to strike; he gave money in exchange for a photograph, and they entered his chronicle of the town in his time.
There were two people James saw often, whose photograph he didn’t take. They were an odd couple: a young black boy and a stocky white woman with white hair. The boy walked on crutches, fast, gazing straight ahead like a sprinter. The woman was fit, though, and kept up with him with no apparent difficulty, with equal single-mindedness. James saw them often, striding up or down Stratford Road. The odd thing was that whether the weather was blazing hot or freezing cold the boy always wore the same clothes: trainers, a pair of shorts and a bicycle helmet on his head, with his powerful torso bared to the elements.
This constitutional was clearly a physical therapy for the boy, although it looked rather more like punishment, like the dour, unsmiling woman was frogmarching him along the pavement; if he slowed down she might slap his bare back or legs; as if it were punishment, indeed, for his disability.
Each time James saw them he wanted to get off his bike and ask what their story was, and to take a photograph of them. He never did. He couldn’t quite bring himself to interrupt their determined progress. And he thought, when he was honest with himself, that to request a snapshot of them would be an affront to their hermetic dignity.
And that was strange, he realized: he was a photographer, and the people on the streets of his town he most wanted to photograph he sensed he would somehow diminish by doing so.
James met Sonia in the nightclub – their eyes met on the dance-floor – and whenever they went dancing again, which would be often, he wondered whether the human being who first thought of moving their body to music had somehow had Sonia in mind as some distant ideal. She was tall and slim, dressed in a red sequinned dress, and she danced all evening with the energy of an aerobics instructor and the sinuous grace of a belly dancer. Sonia’s only regret in life, she would tell James later, was that she wasn’t a black back-up singer for Diana Ross or James Brown.
James spent much of that first evening glancing in her direction and then closing his eyes. His dancing was probably more askew than ever; but it couldn’t have been too awful because some of the times that he did open his eyes he saw hers looking back; and they exchanged brief smiles.
Sonia was with a group of friends, one of whom James knew, and he accepted their invitation to leave with them – early for James, around midnight – and go back to Sonia’s house for coffee.
There were half a dozen of them, and when they went into Sonia’s house she let a teenage girl out, and ushered them into the sitting-room. It was a large, airy room with sanded floorboards and stripped-pine doors, and Habitat furniture that looked as if it had been arranged by a window-dresser.
James left the others in the sitting-room and went through to the kitchen, where Sonia was making coffee.
‘You want a hand?’ James asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Sonia replied. ‘Well, you can reach that bottle of Bailey’s down.’
‘I’ve been wondering,’ James said, ‘whether we’ve met before.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Where? In court?’
‘No, no. I wasn’t there. I’ve got an alibi. Why, are you a judge?’
‘Of what?’ Sonia asked. She had X-ray eyes that appeared to assess his body under his clothes.
‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘What is it? Smells good.’
‘Viennese. With figs.’ Sonia made a jug, and put it on a tray with half a dozen mugs.
‘It’s a nice place, this,’ James said. ‘So close to the centre of town. A couple of minutes from the railway station.’
‘It does us OK,’ she told him.
‘Us?’
‘I’ve got two kids. The three of us.’
‘Are you joking? It’s so neat in there,’ James said, gesturing towards the sitting-room. ‘No toys or anything.’
‘They know if they leave anything downstairs I’ll throw it in the dustbin. So they don’t. They’ve got their den.’
On the crowded dance-floor James had opened
his eyes while dancing and sought her out. Here in the small kitchen, with just the two of them – her friends’ chatter next door both close and far away – he fought equally hard not to look at her. In the bright unpleasant glare of strip-lighting, James could feel his body being pulled towards her.
‘You know something?’ he asked.
‘What?’ she replied.
‘I’d like to kiss you,’ he said.
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ she replied, and they moved together. Their lips met, and then he felt her tongue in his mouth. He closed his eyes, and the glare of the strip-lights was imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.
‘Where’s that coffee?’ came a voice from next door.
‘Shush! You’ll wake her children,’ came another fast on its heels.
In the kitchen Sonia broke off their embrace. ‘Better go through,’ she told him.
James was the first to leave, an hour later, because none of Sonia’s friends showed any signs of shifting; he didn’t want to hang on until he was exhausted. She saw him to the door and they kissed again in the hallway; and they swapped phone numbers and promised to call.
James came round a few days later with a bottle of wine after Sonia’s children had gone to bed. They sank in her sofa and smooched, and drank glasses of red wine, and told each other who they were. Sonia and her husband had split up four years earlier.
‘We didn’t love each other,’ she explained. ‘I realized I didn’t need him, so we divorced. It was pretty clean-cut. The boys see him at weekends.’
On their second date she told him: ‘Listen. I don’t promise anything, OK? I don’t want to get involved. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ James said; ‘I understand.’
Sonia was a solicitor. She told him more about the complexities of the office politics than cases in which she was involved, which he assumed was due to professional discretion.
At first James cycled over to Sonia’s house most evenings around nine, straight from the darkroom or some event he was covering. She made love with an eagerness that took James’ breath away, and waited impatiently for him to recover sufficiently to start again, until he discovered what she wanted, so that their love-making could be conducted in unison.
Sonia had long, black, tumbling hair that she usually wore stacked up on the top of her head, with odd strands falling down around her face: she was elegant, with a glimmer of dishevelment. She had delicate features and deep-set eyes that when she was tired made her look exhausted; she was one of those people, though, for whom a few hours’ sleep were enough to refresh her. And she had a long thin scar up the side of her torso.
‘Is that from a Caesarean?’ James asked her.
When she’d recovered from laughing Sonia explained that it was a childhood operation for a defective kidney, when she was thirteen: the same age as James when he had his operation. Her scar wasn’t unattractive, which made his own feel less conspicuous.
The bearing of children had left no lasting impression on Sonia’s body. James wondered whether they’d come out of her at all; maybe they were secretly adopted. She had a flat stomach and small breasts, and was fitter than he was; she went dancing at weekends and to twice-weekly aerobics classes; from which she came straight home without getting showered or changed, to allow James the pleasure of divesting her of her sweat-soaked leotard.
At first James left early the next morning, before her sons had woken. But that meant really early: David, the younger one, never slept later than seven. James let himself out of the front door, disturbing a flock of ducks by the canal across the road, who waddled around squabbling like indignant gossips: ‘Look, look! There he is! The bugger’s sneaking out! Quack, quack!’
Then David woke much earlier one morning and came crawling into his mother’s bed. James was too sleepy to feel embarrassed and Sonia didn’t seem to mind, and after that it was just plain silly to try to avoid the children. He stayed and breakfasted with them and they all left the house together, James on his bicycle, Sonia in her Peugeot to drop the boys off at school on her way to work.
Sonia worked long and irregular hours, and afterwards she went to drinks parties and dinners to which she took James; she had a tendency to slip off her shoe and fondle his groin under the table, and to drag him into strange kitchens for brief, deep kisses. He felt out of place, but she showed no interest in meeting his bohemian friends, or going to films or exhibitions. Her children were looked after by a child-minder after school and a baby-sitter in the evenings. The weekends they spent with their father and his new wife.
‘They must have lots of semi-maternal relationships,’ James ventured. He felt more like a big brother to them than a substitute father, the idea of which made him uncomfortable.
‘I know, it’s good, isn’t it?’ Sonia replied. ‘They won’t be too dependent on their mother as they grow up. Boys shouldn’t be. You’re quite right.’
‘I wasn’t exactly saying—’
‘Hey, James, they’ll be with their father tomorrow night. Let’s go dancing.’
‘Yeh, let’s do that.’
James felt guilty for distracting the boys’ mother. It was clear, though, that they adored her, with a particular adoration that James recognized.
It was hard not to be selfish. Sonia derided James’ dress sense, and forced him to buy new clothes. She helped him choose a double-breasted suit, as well as white shirts, a silk tie and a pair of brogues. To James’ surprise not only did they not bankrupt him, they made him feel more masculine, and he walked with his shoulders out and back straight after a lifetime of stooping modesty.
Sonia bought him her favourite aftershave, and that Saturday took him to her own hairdresser. When he saw her smiling at him in the mirror he felt proud that such a gorgeous woman was with him, and decided that they weren’t such an odd couple, after all. He was surprised to find how easily he slipped deeper into their relationship. The rest of his life, which had always been busy, contracted here, opened up there, as he spent more and more time with Sonia. He saw less of other people, lost contact with acquaintances and stopped doing things he used to do alone. Including taking photos. James hoped it was just a coincidence that he’d decided he had enough photographs he was happy with to try to mount an exhibition.
James stayed behind in the newspaper at night in the darkroom, making large prints from his own negatives; none from his press work. He’d decided on that. That was his job; this was his art. These were the pictures he’d taken in his own time, on the streets, in parks and clubs, even at friends’ and relatives’ weddings.
Those last he enjoyed most. Each time he studied the contact sheets, scrutinized negatives on the light-box, he chuckled to himself. With this exhibition he would bridge the gap between his colleagues on the paper and his photographer friends; he’d prove to each camp that it was possible to be in both. But what made him laugh was that his best photographs were ones taken at weddings. And if there was one thing the press and artistic photographers had in common it was a disdain for wedding photographers.
None of his serious friends – not Karel nor Terry nor Celia – made any kind of a living from their work. They took odd-jobs, manual work – ‘Like being back bloody home, innit?’ said Karel – and signed on. The one alternative, easy way of making money would have been to cover weddings. They’d only have to do one every Saturday to earn a basic wage and it could hardly be easier work.
‘You could do it with your eyes closed,’ James told them.
None of them, however, would dream of doing so. They considered the possibility but only in jest, in order to have a good laugh dismissing it, a running joke that was perpetually funny.
‘Karel’d have to get himself a decent suit,’ Celia pointed out.
‘I’ve got a bloody suit!’ Karel complained.
The thing was, it was a point of principle, and of pride. It wasn’t like advertising, which would be selling your soul (and which they didn’t laugh about but became angry). It w
as more the fact that they’d never be taken seriously again, by other people or indeed themselves.
Which was why James chuckled to himself now in the newspaper darkroom, because he couldn’t wait to see their faces when they came to the exhibition he would soon have. Not that they were orthodox wedding photographs, groups of bride and groom and bride’s father and mother and the rest. When he was asked to photograph friends’ and acquaintances’ weddings James always told them he would, gladly, but that they’d have to hire an official photographer too to get the compulsory groupings: he would take others, candid black-and-white snaps of them and their guests, the best of which he’d later put in an album and give them as a wedding present. The newly-weds would show those albums off to their friends, who invited James to their weddings. During the course of his twenties he’d been to over a hundred. It was his secret.
He didn’t know why, but James was always in the mood at weddings. Just like the first time he was taken to one, Uncle Jack and Aunt Clare’s, as an eight-year-old boy and his mother had bought him a camera because she was worried he’d fidget through the service, he was always affected by the occasion. He responded to the emotion inherent, if not on open display, within the formal setting. What he didn’t know was why he slipped into the mode of taking photographs.